Onion River Exploration Project: Stockholm

The Aft Pool

Day 11 (8/11/2010) Day 4 Baltic Sea Adventure

Today we spend the entire day at sea. We started the day with breakfast in the Buffet. It has been cloudy and windy most of the day so we have spent our time getting to know the ship. I think we kind of have it down. We found out where our room is when looking at the side of the boat. We are port side just above the front of the #14 life boat. I have heard that cruises are a food fest and that is an understatement. The hardest part is working up an appetite between meals. Tonight is the first “Formal Night”. I am not looking forward to that. That in fact may be my single biggest problem with cruising. I am not exactly the type of person who is used to pampering and find it quite annoying to have people hovering around all the time waiting to answer your every beckon call. Every time you leave the room somebody comes in, straightens up and leaves you information and whatnot for the next stage of your adventure. Perhaps I will get used to it. Tomorrow we go to port in Stockholm. We made it through formal night. We sat with some people from Philadelphia and a group from Liverpool, England. They all seemed very nice.

Chillaxing

Day 12 (8/12/2010) Day 5 Baltic Sea Adventure

We were woke up at 5:30 to a clanging somewhere in the bowels of the ship. We never really did find out what it was but as soon as we looked outside there were hundreds of little islands going past our ship. They started small and grew larger and larger. Finally some started becoming inhabited. As it turns out, Islands appear to be to Sweden what waterfalls are to Norway. As soon as you think you have seen the coolest one ever a new even cooler one pops into view. Unfortunately, by 6:30 there was a heavy fog and you couldn’t see much of anything. This was another time when our balcony came in handy. By the time we would have dressed and made it to the deck the show would have been over.

The start of the Archipeligo

By the time we went and had breakfast the weather started to clear. It turned out to be a beautiful day in many ways. After a beautiful trip in through the archipelago we docked around 10:00. We decided to wait until the crowds cleared and then we went for a walk towards down town. We walked for about an hour from the ship and then back along a scenic channel. We then came back to the pier and boarded a tour boat to take a tour of Stockholm. It turns out that Stockholm is known as the Venice of the North. It is built on twelve islands and is most assessable by water. It has to be one of the most beautiful cities I have seen. It has a very interesting juxtaposition of old and new buildings. Like all Scandinavian countries they are very environmentally conscious. One of the islands is currently being developed so that no cars will be used. To live there you have to use public transportation.

At 5:00 we started making our way back out through the archipelago. It turns out there are 10,000 islands in the archipelago leading in and out of Stockholm some of which are inhabited and some not. In a nutshell it was a wonderful day.